The Companions he did not order to withdraw. They, alone amongst all the galaxy’s sentient peoples, could have defied such a command had it been given.
Bringing the cross guard of his sword to his lips, the Lion met Rubrum Viator's red-glazed eyes through the quillons. The god-engine's machine-spirit growled, shrugging off the gnat-bite efforts of the Companion Terminators as it heeded the Lion's challenge. Steam hissed from shoulder vents as khrave-dominated moderati shunted power to its plasma blastgun. A Titan-killer, the arm weapon glowed blue-white, like a star newly born to the firmament. seething under the rain.
The Lion shifted his weight. From attack, defense, and from defense, attack: an endless and unbreakable spiral of guard and offensive.
He made no movement.
A barrage of twinned blasts haloed Rubrum Viator in shield flare, the oxygen-splitting crack of lascannon fire replaced by the hailstone hammer of heavy bolters on naked armour, as the voids were battered down. The now unshielded Warhound pivoted, arm weapons tracking, just enough to meet head-on the Deathstrike missiles corkscrewing out of the sky.
The explosion lifted Herodael from the ground and sent him skimming back up the road like a pebble. The two Companions, several metres less advanced, were buffeted but held their footing. Their combi-bolters tracked the sky, ever wary of the unknown when the wellbeing of their primarch was in play.
The Lion calmly resheathed his sword as Harpy of Slurnfane descended on vertical thrusters. The downwash of its powerful engines drove back the collected rainwater like a messiah coming into land. Crossfire from a dozen or so khrave-controlled gun nests spasmed and flared across her void shields. The aircraft was heavily armoured, but she had been designed to repel glancing blows from an enemy's air defences whilst dropping at speed, not descending into enfilade in an urban battlefield.
Angling in her wings as she deployed landing claws, the Harpy dragged herself one hundred and eighty degrees about her dorso-ventral axis to turn her larger rear hatch towards the Lion. The ramp began to descend while still in mid-flight as, in contempt of the adjoining fortifications it crushed beneath its span, the Stormbird touched down. Shields flickered like a geomagnetic aurora as the knights of the Third Order's 15th Company pounded down the ramp. Squads Naiant, Acroc, Urinant and Martlet assumed overlapping positions around the screaming bird. They opened fire on the attacking gun towers, serried lines of explosive retribution, grimly delivered, joined a moment later by the heavy blasts of the Harpy's own defensive hard points.
One legionary remained at the top of the hatchway, bolter held low in one hand, pointed to the ground.
Sergeant Kaye marched from the foot of the ramp and threw a salute, spectacularly unmoved by the devastation around him.
'I require your Stormbird, sergeant,' said the Lion.
'It was never mine, Sire.'
‘You will answer to Castellan Duriel until I return to command you otherwise.'
'Yes, Sire.'
The Lion strode onto the ramp.
'Trigaine,' he said.
'Yes, Sire,' said the legionary who had elected to remain aboard.
'You are to come with me.'
VIII
Aravain switched to preysight, the view through his helmet's narrow lenses turning a hard, primeval green, populated by floating threat locks and passive motes of screed. He raised his sword, the cold fire limning its edge going entirely undetected by his war-plate's extensive suite of sensoria.
‘Aravain.’
The voice rang from the bare steel that stretched out from him, ahead and behind.
'Help me. Aravain!'
He continued along the service corridor, sword leading, threat auspex clicking as his preysight slowly de-pixelated the walls from black to brown to forest green. He paused, repositioning his guard to peer into the bottomless well of a maintenance shaft.
Nothing.
'It's me. Aravain. Savine. From the Obrin mission. You and your brothers have hurt it. It's gone now but I don't know for how long.'
’I can see your mind, parasite,' said Aravain. 'Do you think you can deceive me with such outright lies?'
Laughter echoed, the voice deepening and darkening as it sank through the shadows.
'And I see you. Aravain!'
He turned, sword brought up high to guard, but the corridor was empty.
‘Your brother hunters shielded their thoughts with technology, but your mind is an open page.'
‘I am a Librarian of the Firewing, and a knight of the Order of Santales. I can protect my own mind.'
‘Can you, now?' The shadows laughed. Aravain felt it as a prickling cold across his temples.'How old were you when the Imperium killed your father, Aravain?'
'Enough!'
Aravain raised a hand as though to ward against a physical blow and focused his mind, reciting an old woodland prayer once taught to a small boy by a witch of the Northwilds. Whether the old words held some power in themselves or it was the act of mental discipline involved in speaking them, it helped. The prickling sensation eased.
'The Imperium did not kill my father.’
'It didn't tie the noose, but it did drive him from his castle, destroy his forest, raise an arcology hive on his land. As it drove mine to the bottle and an early grave.'
'You will find no resentment in me, xenos. It is my sole joy to serve the Emperor of Mankind.'
'How do you think this hunt ends, Aravain? With my death? Savine is but a host. Kill her and you kill a woman whose only crime was to harbour a petty hatred of you, and when I return it will be from within the body of another.'
The vox ground rough static in his ear.
'To all Knights of Santales, this is the Lion. I am inbound to docking bay twelve. All who are able are to assemble there.'
There was no sign-off or request for confirmation. The frequency simply cut off.
'Kill her and I swear you will be looking over your shoulder until the end of your days,' Savine hissed as she lunged from the darkness.
One moment the shape in front of him was a mess of pipes and shadow, the next it was bulldozing him into the wall. The metal crumpled and deformed under his weight, ceramite gouging out oily sparks. Before he had a chance to counter, Savine punched him in the girdle plating. He heard the bones in her hand shatter, but so too did his armour, the blow lifting him off the ground and bouncing him off the bulkhead. He landed on his breastplate, winded, one lens smashed where he had headbutted the deck. The other stuttered, still struggling for a threat lock as Savine straddled his backplate and ripped his helmet from its clasps. Torn electrics and microfluidics bled onto the back of his neck as Savine placed a cold palm on his head. With every discipline of the Librarius and every catechism of mental fortitude taught to the aspirants to the Firewing, he raised his psychic barriers, knowing even as he did so that they would be insufficient.
With her hand pressed against the back of his head, its empyreal echo pushed through, deeper, shedding its mortal human appearance as it flashed against his mental shields.
He saw an old man, hanging by his neck from the beam of a stone hall.
Light pierced his imagined eyes, too bright.
He looked up.
In place of smoke-blackened wood beams, he saw a young galaxy filled with stars, the gaseous caul of creation still shimmering across its virgin brightness.
An old man, hanging.
He saw through eyes not his own, iron pyramids on steel-grey worlds, worlds blanketed in the desiccated corpses of aeldari and orks and a race that looked almost like men but for the millions of years' disjunction between their evolutions.
An old man.
He saw, not in the wavelengths of light but in the spectra of the nephilic realms, the shimmerings of xenos souls. He saw through the eyes, for want of better terminology, of a creature that had fed on upheaval and strife since the galaxy had been newborn and who, only now, turned its parasitic intellect towards humanity's ascension.
Hanging.
The passing interest of one who had leeched off the lowering empires of prehistory - what greater recognition could the Imperium of Man hope to earn?
Gritting his teeth against the demand to yield, Aravain fought back, uprooting the alien tendrils neuron by neuron from his psyche. The khrave were a species of strife. They fed off division, exploiting mental weakness and mortal deSires, but this one assaulted the mind of a Dark Angel: it would find no fallibility here.
+You cannot fight me.+
+I will fight you until my body fails me, xenos.+
The lobes of his brain clenched like a muscle as they resisted, forcing tendrils of unclean and inhuman thought incrementally but inexorably from his mind.
The visions of primordial devastation became laced with the familiar.
He saw a gathering of knights, hooded and kneeling, in a chamber lit by naked torches. Then another, the stage subtly different, but the participants in their drawn cowls and white surplices eerily unchanged. Another vision came and went, followed by another, and another, like watching a ring of angelic menhirs from a primitive pantheon, standing impervious to the erosion of time as the world around them fell to ruin and was rebuilt and then fell again. It dawned on him that the xenos plundered these memories for the identities of the Knights of Santales, and he felt its frustration as it came to the realisation that even he did not know. He felt himself laugh, not because the khrave lacked the power to rip whatever knowledge it wished from his brain but because, by the law and practice of the Lion, he possessed none of the knowledge that it deSired.
Savine staved his face into the deck plate, breaking the psychic connection.
'You are going to die,' said Aravain, the taste of coagulated blood in his mouth, 'in the manner of every tyrannical xenoform that stood in the path of humanity before you.’ Before he could stop himself, he thought of the Lion, his one regret in death being that he would not live to muster with the rest of the inner circle to do battle in the primarch's company.
The thought tumbled down a spasmodic residue of organo-psychic tissue and into Savine's host-mind. Her grip tightened on the back of his head, and when she spoke, her voice, for a moment at least, was recognisably that of Savine the remembrancer: embarrassed, awed and afraid.
'The Lion,' she whispered, 'the Lion is coming here,' before smashing Aravain's face one last lime against the deck.
EIGHT
I
Harpy of Sturnfane came in like a war horse driven hard through the night: hot hull plating lathered by the stresses of battle, engines wheezing. She broke through the sapphire-blue shimmer of the docking bay's coherence field, turbofans angling to vertical, the downwash blasting detritus from the landing apron. Abandoned equipment and untended gurneys blew away like leaves before a summer storm Landing talons crunched into the ferrocrete apron. Lion El'Jonson ducked through the rear hatch, leaving Trigaine to hold the Stormbird, and strode down the ramp even as it lowered.
The hangar was dark. The occasional unsheathed lumen strip flickered, reflecting off the million pieces of glass debris littering the deck. The majority of the Legion's gunships and starfighters had already been void-borne when the attack had come, but a handful of Xiphon interceptors and Pythos scout planes lay in the gloaming like wounded birds, their pinions broken and their bellies split.
The Lion frowned as he stepped off the apron, boots crunching on glass. He had hunted quarry by touch and smell alone, and been stalked through lightless defiles knowing that the sound of a single breath would be his end.
'You are a less patient hunter than I.'
He drew the Lion Sword, slowly, thumbing the activation rune worked into the grip as it came free, bathing twenty square metres of hangar deck in coolly energised light.
The khrave-host stood exposed where she had been waiting for him on the flight deck. Her hair was the colour and animus of flame, her dark eyes drinking in the glow of the Lion Sword, yet for all her supernatural features, it was her posture that struck him as most uncanny. Lacking the subconscious cower that betrayed even the bravest of men when confronted by a primarch of the Legiones Astartes she stood straight-backed and haughty, jaw upturned as though she looked up because she chose to rather than because the one-and-a-half metre difference in height between them meant that she had to.
"Did you believe you could hide?' he said. 'I am the Angel of Darkness.'
'Lion El'Jonson,' she said in a voice like grinding glass. 'You grace me with your presence at last.'
The Lion dipped his head. The Imperium would never acknowledge this foe or know the cause of their annihilation from history, and so it was only just that the Lion salute a worthy adversary before their end.
'Savine.'
The woman bared black-veined teeth. 'You know her name?'
'Did she imagine that I did not? Is that the petty resentment that weakened her mind to you?' The Lion shook his head. 'No one is admitted aboard my ship without my approval. Nothing transpires here without my knowledge. I keep no secrets that cannot suffer scrutiny. Malcador knows this as well as I. I requested Savine.'
The khrave-host swayed as though struck.
'Savine has suffered for her shortcomings,' the Lion went on. 'As soon will you. I have already slain one of your kind. Your arrogance in facing me is deeply misjudged.'
'He was young,' Savine hissed. 'Barely six times older than your race. You speak to me of arrogance, while failing to recognise the strength in front of you.'
'Tell me your true name, xenos. I alone will recognise it after your demise."
'It is beyond your ability to pronounce or comprehend. 'Savine' will suffice. She would have enjoyed this moment if she were still here.'
A groan passed through the metal flooring, broken glass twitching until the sheet ice spreading outwards from her feet froze it. There was a shriek of metal tearing through metal, and the Lion turned to look as the Harp)’ was dragged screaming off its cradle. Trigaine cried out, hurling himself from the top of the ramp as Savine’s eyes pulsed. It was the unconscious gesture of an alien mind, a command that the Stornmbird's howling jets could not defy. The massive aircraft yawed towards the Lion like a reluctant missile.
The Lion dropped flat to the deck and rolled underneath it, the Harpy missing by no more than a centimetre as its wing ploughed into the deck. It crumpled as though made of paper, shearing off completely as it flipped and rolled. The opposite wing snapped off, the limbless fuselage careening on, shedding hull plates, tail fins and missile pods as it smashed through the parked voidcraft. At some point it ignited, little more than a beaten cylinder caught within a fireball as it crashed into the far wall.
The Lion rose to his feet without speaking, returning his sword to guard.
'Don't fool yourself into thinking that I believed this would be easy,' Savine hissed. 'You think you are the better hunter, but unlike you I learned something from your battle in the Vaniskray.' Another woman and a man walked out of the shadows to join her, side-lit by the chemical fire that was slowly taking hold of the forward bulkhead. They carried themselves like hyenas, the woman in the padded C.-suit of a pilot, the man in the grease-stained coveralls of a deckhand, but one look was enough to tell the Lion that these were no common thralls.
Savine made a fist and slid an open palm across it, a blade of primal ether growing from her hand as though drawn from a scabbard of air.
'Lord Jonson!' Trigaine barked, assuming a braced firing position with one knee on the landing apron as the other two khrave-hosts drew matching blades.
'For the Emperor!’ the Lion roared, surging into the charge as Trigaine opened fire
Light bursts of bolter fire ricocheted between the khrave-hosts' arcane aurae. Savine's form blurred as the air in front of her thickened and reshaped, clumping into an aggregate of psychic energies that she propelled towards the Lion with a thought. It would have punched a hole through an armoured column, but where a primarch did battle even the warp found itself deformed, and the
psychic shockwave broke like water over jagged reefs before sweeping harmlessly across his robes.
The deckhand and the pilot came at him in the wave's psychic wake, witchblades spitting darkness as the Lion Sword swept out to give them battle.
Twenty demigods of genic alchemy the Emperor had wrought, but the Lion had been the first, the template and the paragon upon which all of his brothers were mere copies. The khrave-hosts moved at near-impossible speeds. Witchblades hissed as they reacted to every movement of the Lion Sword that rippled back from the relic blade's future. Their joints cracked, bones breaking, smoke rising from their muscles as they strove to match the grace, speed and fury of a primarch at war.
They were hopelessly outclassed.
The Lion parried a jab to the groin and turned it, rolled around the darting flick of the second, and then coolly hackhanded the Lion Sword through the pilot's shoulders. The power sword chopped the woman’s torso in half. The sudden death-trauma expelled the khrave consciousness with a psychic scream that bowled the deckhand onto his back. The Lion was above him before the back of his head hit the deck. He twirled the Lion Sword until it was overhead, point down, and then drove it through the second khrave-host's heart.
'Sire!' yelled Trigaine.
The Harpy's battered nose section came bumping and sparking back across the deck on a straight shot for the Lion. He dropped to the ground. The gunship remnant burned overhead, disintegrating finally in an explosion of fiery motes that swiftly took over a third of the bay The Lion turned back to Savine. She was gone.
‘Now who is the better hunter?'
The Lion looked up.
The khrave-host hovered a metre above him.
She dropped with a laugh, sinking her claws into his scalp.
II
The docking bay disappeared. It was still there, after a fashion, a reflection glimpsed through smoke, vanishing with every shift of the wind. The fire guttered to embers, the shadows stretching up like tall trees, like bars. The hard bangs of Trigaine's bolter were an echo through the vastness of a forest at dawn.
Lion El'Jonson- Lord of the First - David Guymer Page 11